Gaining 4 Years of Software Engineering Experience in 4 Months

Shift 01

From Engineer to Manager Overnight

AI is changing how we build software.

For most of my career, software development meant writing code line by line, file by file. Today, I can hand a task to an agent and watch it do what used to take me hours or days: research the problem, write code, run tests, and report results.

In practice, it feels like having a junior-to-mid-level software engineer working with me full-time. I can assign work, ask follow-up questions, request improvements, and redirect when implementation goes off track.

This changes everything.

When we work with agents at scale, we naturally move into a management role. I do not always read every line of generated code. Sometimes I review diffs deeply, but often I evaluate through behavior: test cases, summaries, app checks, and whether the feature works in production-like flows.

That is exactly how managers have worked for years with human teams.

• define goals
• split work into tickets
• review progress
• validate outcomes
• ship

The strange part is that many of us engineers used to dislike this side of software work. Tickets, standups, status updates, visibility tasks, and process overhead felt like distractions from real engineering.

Now I run multiple worktrees, assign parallel tasks to agents, and maintain instruction files like AGENTS.md to enforce workflow discipline.

• keep tickets linear
• update tasks while working
• post daily summaries
• keep decisions documented

The same managerial habits I used to resist now make perfect sense when coordinating several autonomous coding streams at once.

Shift 02

Priority Shift: Product Delivery Over Code Craft

Another major shift is personal: my top priority is now delivering a working product, not polishing every implementation into the most elegant possible version.

In the past, I could spend hours refining structure, style, and optimization details. Sometimes my manager would ask why I was still improving internals when the feature already worked. Now I understand that tension from the other side.

When agents dramatically increase implementation speed, bottlenecks move upward.

• scope decisions
• sequencing
• quality gates
• release coordination
• customer feedback loops

You still need strong technical judgment, but your leverage comes more from direction than from typing speed.

Shift 03

Will AI Code Be Garbage?

Let us be honest about the fears.

Will there be bugs? Yes. Human teams shipped bugs for decades.

Will some code quality be poor? Yes. Even large, well-funded software organizations have shipped fragile systems.

Will we ship code we do not fully understand? Very likely. That already happened before AI too. The industry has countless stories of production bugs that took weeks or months to trace.

Will there be slop? Definitely. A skill that used to be protected by a high barrier is now far more accessible.

That democratization is both a gift and a risk.

Shift 04

Why It Feels Like 4 Years in 4 Months

I cannot literally compress time. What experienced managers learn in four years cannot be fully simulated in a single season.

But by running multiple projects in parallel, including personal projects, I compressed exposure to decision-making cycles.

• planning
• delegation
• review
• release
• incident handling
• iteration

When those loops run every week instead of every quarter, you accumulate experience rapidly.

That is why I say it feels like I gained four years of software engineering experience in four months.

Not because I magically skipped fundamentals, but because I repeatedly practiced higher-level responsibilities under real delivery pressure.

Shift 05

The Hidden Cost: Mental Exhaustion

There is a misconception that if AI writes most code, the work becomes easy. My experience is the opposite.

The hardest part is holding the whole project in your head.

• product direction
• roadmap
• architecture
• tradeoffs
• timeline
• quality risks

Things that used to unfold over months are now expected in days or weeks. That compression creates a different kind of fatigue: less mechanical typing stress, more cognitive orchestration stress.

I felt that exhaustion clearly.

Shift 06

The Evolution of AGENTS.md: From Coding Notes to SDLC Playbook

One under-discussed area is how instruction files evolve.

At first, my agent docs were mostly coding style and technical guardrails. Over time, they expanded into something closer to SDLC operating manuals.

• how tasks are tracked
• how progress is reported
• how verification is done
• how handoff summaries are written
• how release readiness is judged

In other words, prompt files are becoming lightweight management systems. That evolution alone teaches you a lot about what software leadership actually is.

Shift 07

A New Learning Pattern (and Its Risks)

There is another deeper shift happening: how humans learn technical subjects.

Traditionally, we learned from basics to advanced in a structured sequence. Now, with AI, we often receive only the piece we need right now. That is powerful, but it can create shallow confidence.

AI is different because it can answer follow-up questions and provide context interactively. But it introduces another risk: confident falsehoods. Human minds are not fully prepared for systems that can sound authoritative while being wrong.

So we need a new discipline.

• ask better questions
• verify claims
• test assumptions in code
• stay humble about what we actually understand

Shift 08

The Best Outcome: Software Is No Longer a Closed Gate

Despite the concerns, one thing makes me genuinely happy.

Building software is no longer a guarded skill available only to people with specific geography, credentials, or elite network access.

Talented people with limited resources can now build real products. And they are already doing it.

That is a historic change.

Shift 09

My Position: Concerned, but Optimistic

I do have concerns about where this goes.

• quality drift
• over-reliance
• cognitive laziness
• information overload

But overall, I am optimistic.

As a Muslim, I believe we are responsible for using tools with intention, ethics, and service to people. Technology itself is not the destination. It is a means.

If we stay grounded in purpose and accountability, this shift can expand human creativity instead of shrinking it.

Shift 10

Final Thought

I do not claim to have the final answer. I am still processing many of these changes.

But one thing is clear in my experience: coding agents did not make engineering irrelevant. They changed where value sits.

The leverage is moving from who can type the fastest to who can think clearly, direct systems well, and ship useful products responsibly.

That is why the last four months felt like an accelerated career chapter. Not because coding got easy. Because software leadership arrived at my desk earlier than expected.